John Garzoli

Why am I here?

I’m here because music is almost as much fun to think as it is to play. To be more expansive in exploring the ‘whys’ presupposes knowledge I’m not sure I have and ‘how’ seems less definitive it is less likely to end in false attributions and invites a story. My earliest memories of music come from my parents record collection. Classical music (especially Beethoven), bushranger ballads, Nana Moussorgsky, Bert Kamfert and other stuff commonly found on the shelves of op shops. I learned guitar as a kid; taught by Catholic brothers, friend’s older brothers, and numerous pretenders in a small country town. The remoteness of the town enabled allowed anyone bold enough to claim to be a guitar teacher to charge as one. Guitar was fun and by 13 I had joined a band with other kids and we did some gigs. While I was without talent, the tuck-shop mums at school occasionally asked what I would do with ‘my music’. I preferred sport and was better at it. The combination of footy, guitar, and teenage impatience is a poor match for school, so by 15 I was done with it. Part of the how lies in that decision and the regret that gnawed at me for years.

By 20 I had already spent 6 months working in the American mid-west and my subsequent return to rural Australia was destined to short-lived. I moved to Melbourne where a series of dead-end jobs led me to seriously return to the question of what I might do with ‘my music’. I enrolled in a music course at a TAFE where I discovered that a benefit of desperation is the intense commitment to practice it can prompt. A combination of good luck and a likely weak pool of applicants opened a place for me in the Jazz course at VCA the following year. There, I learned what the hands, ears, and imaginations of good musician can do. No amount of disciplined practice can bridge that gap, but it enabled me to acquire enough skill and knowledge to perform (without huge embarrassment) and teach.

At college, I was intrigued by how and why music made people do what it did. What was meaningful about music, where do its meanings may lie, how might they be explored, and how could they be described. Upon reflection, this fascination was likely a way to project expertise about music (albeit in a myopic species of formalism that was shot through with romantic aesthetic ideals and presented with the smugness of an insecure young male) because I couldn’t really play well enough to be especially impressive at music. My attempts to pursue serious study of this or any other topic I now know to be ‘musicological’ were however, curtailed in the arid intellectual climate of VCA.

A subsequent career teaching in fancy private schools and performing supermarket jazz in expensive city food-halls confirmed that my trajectory was not join to place me on a bandstand with Miles, Keith, or Pat. So after a few years of this, and a battle with debilitating chronic fatigue, I abandon that life and went and did something else. I said goodbye to my home St Kilda and travelled to Thailand with an exceptionally talented violinist I had studied with at VCA. We found a job at a lovely beach resort where moneyed people relax. There, we played Bach, jazz, bossa nova, saccharine Thai pop, and ditties the King composed. After ten years of relentless a jobbing as a musician on Koh Samui and in Bangkok, I became a competent performer.

 

I had plenty of spare time to fill gaps in my knowledge left barren by my formal education and I used it to cultivate a dilettante interest in history, language, Buddhism, various strands of philosophy, and psychology. This came in handy in the next place I landed. During this period I also learned that Thai music is a mystery that defeated both my taste and interest. I returned to Australia in 2006 and did a graduate diploma in education. The intellectual materials presented in this program were shallow and dangerously basic. But the most important thing I learned was that even though I had taught guitar in schools for years, I was not going to be a classroom teacher. I had done enough with my life to know that I couldn’t be part of a vocational ecosystem that involved attempting to dissuade year 9 boys from throwing steel rulers into a rotating ceiling fan.

I love teaching and think I am good at it, but I took the hint from my many music-trained colleagues who work in schools. These fine musicians have had long and successful teaching careers, but they did it teaching woodwork, or English, or maths, anything but music. So I did a masters degree in education-as a pathway to a PhD in jazz pedagogy. While studying, I worked with the Solar Thermal Research Group within the engineering department at the ANU. As the completion date for that project approached, I looked for a Ph.D. program that would accept my proposal for investigating jazz pedagogy in Australian universities. Six months of rejections made it clear that no university was going to allow a professional musician with a higher degree in education to scrutinise its jazz curriculum or the practices of the teachers who deliver it. A professor who could sniff the breeze recommended I propose another topic. I was accepted into the PhD program in the Music School at Monash Uni. There, I was welcome to study Thai-Western hybridity but NOT how jazz was taught. In the first six months of my candidature I worked in the Jazz unit with a highly accomplished and respected performer and educator.

If there is a point at which I realised that something is wrong with universities, it was here.

Following the discipline, creativity, and professionalism of the team at ANU, the music school at Monash was shambolic. My supervisor and I were so alarmed that we brought our concerns (and evidence of misconduct) to senior staff who duly rebuffed our complaints. My supervisor quit and upon learning that he had been subject to wage-theft (by now the defining character of the Australian universities institutional disposition), subsequently threatened legal action. A brief period working at the government agency that regulates the tertiary sector confirmed that what looks to me and other scholars like a bin-fire, is actually how Australia’s tertiary industry is intended to operate. These factoids are just precursory circumlocutions that other factoids that I might recall on another night could equally do within such a story.

In 2010 I was granted a large scholarship to undertake 18 months of doctoral fieldwork at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. This was the transformative moment. I had up-close encounters with Thai music, its sounds and rituals but this time as a bewildered student rather than as a dismissive Western musician. My confusion was complete as the musical sounds my teachers heard as beautiful in their organisation and timbre were incomprehensible to me. This chastening experience rendered all the certainties I held as a performer, teacher, and theorist of music quite hollow.

 

I had long accepted that music is meaningful in innumerable ways. I had even attempted to convince colleagues and students alike that there is no objective basis for claims such as ‘Bach is objectively better than Springsteen’. But training in Thai music showed me that music doesn’t just sound different to ‘Western’ music, it has potential meanings and values I hadn’t even considered, and are unlikely to ever fully comprehend. I attempted to claw my way out of this fog of confusion. First by asking Neil McLachlan about the disorientation I felt when I hearing the unfamiliar pitches of the Thai percussion instruments I was playing. I then asked Stuart Grant about the ‘problem’ of musical ontology. I met with these men for private chats about 4 years until it became clear that we might learn interesting things about how to think about music by putting our heads together. Our discussions inaugurated a mode of thinking that I have not encountered. There is no place in our discussions for the petty disciplinary jealousies that have been so corrosive of collegiality in the competitive Hobbesean jungles of a university with is demoralising institutional pressures. Our method requires generous dispositions and willingness to stay in the question. We dissolve supposed antagonisms between continental philosophy, Heideggerian phenomenology, performance studies, musicology, enthnography, and neuroscience (to list the barest minimum). We think in and through the possible meanings these perspectives offer as a way of releasing music from the zombie categories of orthodox musicological thought. Among other things, this thinking knows music is magic

and we let ourselves be enchanted when it plays us. And our work shows that discussions about music that involve ideas from disparate intellectual domains need not result in knife fights.

Others who think in and about music have become frustrated by the accepted categories of musical thought and wish to escape the questionable (even odious) values they smuggle in. As more join, the discussions stretch and flex and have become the most intellectually challenging thing I have done. And it feels like we are just getting started. If there is a ‘why I’m here’, it is because of all those ‘hows’ over many years that have been quietly pushing me towards this intellectually rich and happy place.